Kane & Lynch 2 Still Seems Cool

The Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days media tour cruised through our office last week with the opportunity to play the restaurant and Shanghai street scene that we watched someone else play back in January. After playing it for myself, I continue to be interested in seeing more, but it's also fascinating to see what, exactly, this game has become.

For those of you just joining us, the previous Kane & Lynch game focused a lot on squad tactics. You had a crew with you fairly frequently, and you could order them around in the name of "getting other people to do stuff for you." It's certainly not the worst idea in the world. In fact, a game IO produced before K&L1, Freedom Fighters, dealt with this exact gameplay system. The difference is that your posse in Freedom Fighters felt effective, and you could easily clean up any mess with your own weapons. The crew in Kane & Lynch was kind of useless. And the shooting in Kane & Lynch was, to put it lightly, not so good.

With all of that in mind, it's surprising, but totally understandable that Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days has thrown away just about all of that stuff. This time there's no crew to weigh you down, no orders to give. K&L2 is a standard third-person shooter with a cover system and a two-player cooperative component. It's 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand with white dudes and, as far as I can tell, no big-ass ramps. It's not exactly the most inspired game concept in the world, but by layering a lot of unique visual elements over the action. Dog Days still stands out as something potentially rad.

It's the violently shaking camera, deliberately lo-fi filters, and things like color-banding and bleeding that makes Dog Days work. At times, it's incredibly disorienting. But when you combine all of that visual noise with a high-tension shootout with Shanghai's police department, it makes the whole thing feel incredibly manic and, well, dangerous. Another nice touch is that some shots hit so hard that they'll knock you down. It's not really Gears-style bleed out situation. Instead, it's just one more way for the game to keep you off-balance. You can stand up with a quick press of the A button, or crawl behind cover and get up in a slightly safer place. But seeing it in motion is what really sells Kane & Lynch 2. That's why it's kind of frustrating that so little video footage has been released so far.

And here are some new screenshots. Square-Enix and IO are set to show off the game's multiplayer soon, so we'll have more on the game's Fragile Alliance mode in the relatively near future.

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